Selecting your resource management strategy

Selecting the right resource management strategy is crucial to properly managing and delivering on your projects. In Forecast, there are two kinds of strategies to choose from depending on your method of working: Assign people to tasks and Allocate people to projects.

These two are mutually exclusive, meaning that you can only have one of them active at any given time. When you switch from one to the other, this will have an impact on your entire Forecast account, most importantly the heatmap. See Reviewing your resource heatmap for more information on the topic.

This article covers:

• Choosing your Resource Management Strategy
• Configuring your Resource Management Settings

Choosing your Resource Management Strategy

Allocate people to projects

Allocating people to projects can be beneficial for companies that prefer a more agile way of working (software development). You would use project allocations in cases where the tasks are not known in advance but you want to book a team member for e.g 100 hours over the next month. In this case, you would opt for the allocate people to projects options.

Project allocations allow you to book team members for projects rather than specific tasks. This can be viewed as creating soft bookings. With project allocation, you book people’s time for projects which then affects their heatmap. You can either book them on a percentage basis or on a total amount of hours.

Project allocations are more flexible than task allocations and are ideal for companies that are unable to scope out projects in advance, but know that they need a specific number of resources for a certain amount of time on a project.

Assign people to tasks

Assigning people to tasks is useful for companies with a more waterfall way of working, where projects are scoped out in advance with well-defined tasks. Using this resource management setting you're assigning team members to specific tasks.

There are two additional options to select from when using Task Allocation. 

• Task Estimates - your heatmap in the schedule will be calculated based on the time estimates on a task. 
• Time Registered & Remaining - your heatmap in the schedule will be calculated based on time registrations for past dates and remaining task estimates for current and future dates. The more precise setting out of the two. Ideal for teams that log time daily.

Configuring the Resource Management settings

The general Resource Management settings are configured by administrators only.

To configure your Resource Management settings

1. Click on your profile and select the Admin panel
2. Navigate to the Details tab
3. Under Resource management select Assign people to tasks or Allocate people to projects